Have you ever heard clever marketing folks throw around the phrase “customer retention is the new acquisition”?
Implying that retention efforts have fully replaced customer acquisition work is a bit silly—in the end, you need to win new customers before you can retain them—but the statement’s core still rings true: you shouldn’t just obsess over new business, but also focus on how you can retain your existing customers.
Email can be a powerful communication channel to keep your customers engaged, encourage them to continue using your product, and ultimately reduce churn and grow your business. We recently got to sit down with Robin, founder and CEO at Blue Cat Reports, who shared how implementing clever, helpful digest emails helped reduce churn for his business. Here’s his story.
With Blue Cat Reports, Robin and his team have built helpful reporting tools for Trello. If you’ve worked with Trello before, you might know that it’s a truly fantastic tool for managing day-to-day project management tasks, but it can also be quite hard to see the bigger picture. With Blue Cat Reports, you can add a reporting layer to your Trello projects, so you can create the charts and custom reports you need to see the status of all your projects in one place. Handy!
Robin and his team found that customers clearly had a need for the product. They signed up and started using the reports—but eventually, quite a few customers dropped out. And when Robin asked them why, a pattern emerged: Folks said they really enjoyed the reporting and found the insights helpful, but checking in on progress meant manually checking web dashboards. That was an extra step that some folks just didn’t do regularly, and their usage decreased. It was those customers who weren’t getting the full value out of their subscription, and they eventually churned.
But Robin had an idea: What if you could deliver progress reports and charts straight into project managers inboxes? With the help of Postmark, he implemented a feature that does just that:
Instead of requiring customers to visit their dashboard every time they want to check on their projects’ progress, Blue Cat now conveniently delivers the same information in daily summary reports via email.
The implementation of these emails was pretty straightforward—in a nutshell, Blue Cat is grabbing a screenshot of each customer’s dashboard and then automatically embedding that image in a custom email—but the results were incredible:
With our digest emails we bring key product functionality straight into customers’ inboxes, so they can experience the value of our reporting tools without having to visit their dashboards. Since we’re implemented these emails, we’ve seen churn drop significantly. Before we sent digest emails, we sometimes experienced double-digit churn rates. Now, churn has dropped well below 5%.
Robin has used Postmark for more than 8 (!) years. We’ve handled Robin’s transactional emails since he started his business back in 2014, and when he wanted to implement the new digest emails, he said it was clear that he wanted to send this via Postmark, too. When we asked Robin why, he said:
Because Postmark just works.
I want to focus on building my business, not troubleshooting email issues. And throughout all these years, Postmark has always been a reliable partner.
Thanks for the kind words, Robin! Here’s to many more years of powering your emails!
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